Scripture Readings:
Romans 12:1-8,
1I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. 3For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, 5so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
Matthew 24:14-30
14And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come. 15“So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), 16then those in Judea must flee to the mountains; 17the one on the housetop must not go down to take what is in the house; 18the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. 19Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! 20Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath. 21For at that time there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. 22And if those days had not been cut short, no one would be saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short. 23Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look! Here is the Messiah!’ or ‘There he is!’ —do not believe it. 24For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. 25Take note, I have told you beforehand. 26So, if they say to you, ‘Look! He is in the wilderness,’ do not go out. If they say, ‘Look! He is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. 27For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 28Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. 29“Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. 30Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven’ with power and great glory.
"... for the Transformation of the World."
Katherine Parker
Arun Sua Sdai. I am delighted by the opportunity to be with you this morning. This morning I’d like to share with you a little bit about the mission of our church in Cambodia, where I work with the Community Health and Agriculture Development program.
You may be familiar with Cambodia because of the magnificent Buddhist Temples of Angkor Watt, but in recent years, Cambodia has also struggled through a series of foreign occupations and the murderous regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. During those 4 devastating years, maybe 2-3 million Cambodians died of starvation, forced labor or were brutally murdered. Anyone with education was particularly targeted, children were taught to distrust their parents and community structures disintegrated.
Those who escaped to refuge camps encountered Christians, and many were inspired. When Christianity became legal in Cambodia in 1992 many of these Christians began returning to share with their neighbors the new opportunities to heal and grow in trust for each other that they had learned. In 1998 the UMC started a formal Mission Initiative in Cambodia. And today there are 143 Methodist congregations in Cambodia. Hope continues to grow, 2009 has seen progress in reconciliation with the trial of four former Khmer Rouge leaders.
And in this process, the United Methodist Church has been their helping to rebuilding communities, sharing the values of trust and hope.
People from over 10 countries are involved in this mission. List them fast (Kenya, Zimbabwe, The Philippines, Malaysia, Switzerland, France, Finland, Singapore, Indonesia, Korea and the US). Missionaries from all these places are in partnership with Cambodians to build a new church. We are training leaders, teaching children, investing in agriculture and micro-enterprise development, caring for the sick, writing music, and sharing the love of God we know through Jesus Christ.
I’d like to share with you the story of Binn Im, a pastor in the rural village of Prekedai to give you a picture of the Methodist Church in Cambodia. The story Binn Im told me started a few years ago when she joined a women’s group in Battembong like our UMW here; this study and support group shared about self-worth and provided grants for women to start small livelihood projects. Binn Im received a sow pig, which she struggled to raise, but she reared two litters of piglets and pass several of them on to other women in her community. Both Binn Im and her son responded to the call to ministry and attended the Methodist Bible College in Phnom Penh.
After graduation, Binn Im was appointed to Prekedai. She jumped straight into ministering to the needs of her neighbors. She coordinated with the CHAD program (Com Health Ag Dev) for a volunteer in mission medical team from Colorado to provide a free clinic in her village. In the dry season, it takes an hour on a dirt road to get from the provincial city of Batambong to Prekedai, but during the rainy season the doctors traveled almost 3 hours to get to her village. Many people were served including a man with a snake bit that almost lost his leg.
Binn Im is also concerned about food security for her community. Seasonal hunger is still a reality in Cambodia. Many poor people don’t have the money to build proper rice storage facilities, so as soon as rice is harvested they sell it at a low price to the buyers. You try to save enough rice to eat for the year, but if your family faces any small crisis such as needing to go to the hospital or a child getting married, the cash is quickly used up and families even sell the little rice they might have saved to eat. Taking a rice loan during the rainy season is an expenses proposition. To borrow rice to use as seed until your harvest comes in, you have to pay 100% interest. While this might be a necessary economic rate because of the high default on such loans, it also keeps people in poverty.
Binn Im organized 15 families in her community to work together to build a small barn on the church property to store rice. One man went up to the mountains for 2 days to cut the small trees to build the frame, another family donated nails, another split bamboo to frame the walls and every family helped make the thatch for the roof and walls, they are trying to raise money now to buy a corrugated-metal roof to make the structure more lasting. Binn Im was thinking of selling her pigs to finance the capital for a rice bank, but CHAD was able to give the group $750 to buy several tons of rice.
I visited the group to talk with them about their by-laws. They had organized themselves into groups of 4 or 5 families to be guarantors for each other to take loans and had set the interest rate at 30%. The rice-barn they are building is not that big, it can only hold about 2x what they have it in now. I asked them what they were going to do with the interest they collected. Two things, first they wanted to include more families in their village, but second they thought that after 3 or 4 years they would have enough rice to take half of it to the next village and suggest that they start a rice bank too.
I often get quizzical looks when I tell people I am missionary; what is it that you do? Isn’t that so last century? There are a lot of modern titles that could equally well describe my job. I’m a community organizer, an agriculture extension agent, a micro-loan officer, a grant writer and a journalist. But I think there is something special about the approach we take to all of these things when we do them as the church community.
Meas Nee is a leading Cambodian scholar on Community Development. In his book “Learning for Transformation” he quotes Buddhist theologian Venerable Maha Ghosananda who says:
A
Peaceful Heart makes a Peaceful Person,
A Peaceful Person makes a
Peaceful Family,
A Peaceful Family makes a Peaceful Community,
A
Peaceful Community makes a Peaceful Nation
And a Peaceful Nation
makes a Peaceful World.
Nee goes on to say “Given the culture and political context of Cambodia, … many [Cambodians] genuinely fear making a mistake or taking a risk. Many doubt their capacity to respond, or they fear being blamed. They prefer the security of ‘rules’ and guidelines. Unless [people] are liberated from their fears they will be unable to work in liberating ways with others.”
CHAD has a non-discrimination policy for all of our projects. Everyone is invited to participate in our health clinics and livelihood development projects regardless of religious conviction and with no strings attached. But sometimes people are inspired.
I was in Rovin last summer, having dinner with Pastor Vunthy and I asked him to tell me why he became a Christian. He said that as a young man, he felt isolated from his community, and he never talked with his mother or sisters. But, he met a Christian pastor in his hometown who shared with him the basic idea of Christianity that God loves us for us, not for our works. It is this grace, this love that comes first that allows us to respond in love.
Knowing that he was first loved changed Vunthy’s life. He was liberated from his fears, found a peaceful heart and he was inspired to help others. And he became a pastor and an evangelist. His mother is still a Buddhist, but he reports that he now has a wonderful relationship with her and that she supports his ministry, recently buying him a motorcycle. And I think this is the power of faith in development. There is lots of work to be done to provide skills and economic opportunities for development, but the opportunity to find that peaceful heart and release our fears, gives us the opportunity to help others. And as the church community, we covenant together to learn, to share, to worship and to support each other to grow in faith.
At the General Conference last year, the Bishop’s presented a revised version of the mission statement for our denomination “To make disciples of Jesus Christ, for the transformation of the world”. To me, the second part comes first – we, who are already disciples of Jesus Christ, we have a vision of a transformed world, and we are working to make that a reality.
And the first part – to make disciples of Jesus Christ – means that we are not exclusive, we don’t think that it is just our job to transform the world, but that everyone is invited to participate in this community and to work together for this vision.
When Vunthy’s life changed, he became able to help others, and it is inspiring to see the work he is doing in his community. Working primarily with high school students, he is sharing hope and a vision for the future. CHAD has helped a little bit too. We recently gave them $1000 to buy 4 cows so the group of students will have resources to use as they begin to develop their own livelihood.
The projects we support as the Methodist Mission in Cambodia are two fold. First, we Christians here in the US and around the world are responding to God’s love in our lives; we are sharing our resources and knowledge to start development projects so that people can improve their lives. But the projects themselves can serve a second purpose. For new Cambodian Christians, they can be an exercise in stewardship. I remember when I was little that my parents gave me $.75 for my weekly allowance, $.25 to buy a popsicle on Tuesdays at school, $.25 to go into my savings, and $.25 to put in the offering on Sunday. I got the opportunity to practice.
Stewardship is even harder, it involves caring for what has been entrusted to us and figuring out how to share that with others. A development project gives the group members an opportunity to practice helping their neighbors by passing on a piglet or calf or by inviting their neighbors to join a new rice-bank. This is not one-way giving, it is recognizing everyone equally desiring to love God by serving neighbor, it is giving and receiving, passing-on and participating. Mission in the 21st century is to share our gifts with others, and the invite others to join us in sharing their gifts with us and with the world.
Before I go into a village to hold a workshop or a meeting, I stop and pray the words of the hymnist: Brother, sister, let me serve you, let me be as Christ to you, pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.